Review: In Regency romance Lord Holt Takes a Bride by Vivienne Lorret, Lord Holt literally takes a bride

 

If you regularly read my reviews of Regency romances you know I hate kidnapping plots.  Yet, even though the entirety of Lord Hold Takes a Bride by Vivienne Lorret revolves around a kidnapping, another kidnapping, another . . . I lost track -- it was mostly really fun.  

SPOILERS:

 

 

Heroine Winn runs away from an arranged marriage, and finds herself kidnapped by hero Asher Holt.  They have all kinds of great adventures for the next few days as they make their way towards Winn's aunt.  There are bad guys to escape from, and sweet horses to steal, and cows to learn how to milk, and drenching rain to get soaked in.  They are having the time of their life, and it's enjoyable to go along for the ride.

Not so enjoyable is an unpleasant reveal about Asher's motivation that comes halfway through the book.  He has been lying about something really big.  He is a cad.

The ending was also quite a letdown. Rather than Asher figuring out how to move forward -- and I really, really wanted him and Winn to sail away in search of buried treasure, which seemed to be where this book was leading -- he is miraculously rescued by a distant, rich relative. He and Winn go on to leave a dull, conventional (although happy) life, in which she decides when she is three months pregnant that she does not want to travel until after the baby is born.  I know both Asher and Winn are only children, but can you not?  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to travel with a baby, toddler, young child?  And are you planning on having only one?

There was also a very sad interlude in the middle of the book where Asher and Winn are befriended by a farmer who seems wise and lovely.  He learns something devastating, turns home, and is never heard from again.  I want a book about him. 

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Twitter I Hardly Knew Ye

I joined Twitter in 2019 (with the uninspired handle @Jasmine76625993; feel free to follow me), making me late to the party.  I was warned that the site was a cesspool full of haters and incels and general nastiness. 

For me, nothing was further from the truth.  Over more than three years I slowly and painstakingly built to around 4500 followers, which was important because the main reason I joined Twitter was to publicize my smutty novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames, and later my book of smutty short stories, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire.  And of course my posts on this blog.  I get the word out in other ways, but Twitter has taken over as my main vehicle for promotion.

Because this was my main use for Twitter, I became part of the #WritingCommunity on it, a corner of Twitter where people are really, really nice.  I made some friends.  One of them, Annabelle Brito, @annabellebrito, has made beautiful artwork for one of my stories as well as a new Twitter avatar for me.  Many, many others have retweeted my posts, or given me a platform in their "writer's lifts," where they invite everyone to tweet links to their work.  I think my post that got the most responses ever was "Oxford comma, yes or no?" which is what you would expect when you engage with writing geeks.  

Only once did I run into nastiness on Twitter.  After seeing Dune during a rare pandemic excursion to a movie theater, I posted that I was really puzzled by a preview I had seen for King Richard, the movie about the father of Serena and Venus Williams (and for which Will Smith was attending the Academy Awards when The Slap happened).  I wondered why a movie would be made about the father of these two phenomenal tennis players instead of about them.  The vitriol I received in response was both astonishing and scary.  I was told I was an idiot for not understanding that Richard Williams had decided when Serena and Venus were in the womb that he would raise them to be tennis stars, and that all credit for their success must go to him.  Dozens of tweets like this.  Whereas before I had just thought it was a weird choice for a movie, now I was actually nervous for Serena and Venus because of the view of an apparently significant portion of the world that they were and are empty marionnettes who acted throughout their lives only as a result of their father pulling their strings. When I pondered why every parent didn't simply decide that their unborn child would become a superstar and then make it happen, I was (unsurprisingly) met with more vitriol.

I put my head down and returned to the #WritingCommunity.  

And now, the continued existence of Twitter is uncertain.  Just as I ignore the bad that Amazon does in the world because it allows me self-publish my novels, I ignore Elon Musk's -- er, issues --because Twitter works for me, regardless of the increasing ugliness outside of my corner of it.  But Musk is now talking about the platform declaring bankruptcy. And if Twitter goes away, I am left high and dry, having put too many eggs in this marketing basket.

All of which is to say: if you want to keep reading my smutty stories, my occasionally not smutty stories, my book reviews and other pop culture reviews, please subscribe to this blog.  On the web version of the blog (which you can get to on your phone by pressing "web version"), the follow button is in the right hand column, under the Mindgames cover.  

I don't have any plans to leave Twitter, but if Twitter leaves me I'll still be here.